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Tolkien proves he's still the king

The arrival of a new J.R.R. Tolkien novel in bookstores this week is an occasion of no small anticipation, mixed with a measure of cautious skepticism.

The Children of Húrin, released today in the U.K. and tomorrow in North America, is the second title published under the popular author's name since his death in 1973.

It is also the first to come out since the trilogy of films adapted from The Lord of the Rings introduced Tolkien to a new generation of fans. The initial print run is half a million copies covering eight languages.

Thanks partly to filmmaker Peter Jackson, the Tolkien brand has never been stronger. Fully one-third of the 150 million copies of The Lord of the Rings sold to date were purchased after the release of the first film in the series. And now gamers can look forward to the April 24 release of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

Before its release, The Children of Húrin ($35, 320 pages) already ranked as a Top 10 order on Amazon.ca.

Its ballyhooed U.K. launch includes an event tomorrow at London bookseller Waterstones attended by actor Bernard Hill, who played Theoden in The Lord of the Rings films.

And starting yesterday, fans were chatting up Tolkien experts as part of an online release party at tolkiengateway.net.

On the other hand, one of the topics sure to be raised in the chat rooms is whether The Children of Húrin is anotherSilmarillion, the posthumous 1977 book that some of the author's most devoted readers couldn't finish.

"The Silmarillion is quite a difficult book," says David Brawn, publishing director at HarperCollins in the U.K. "And it's true that when it was first published, people were disappointed by it because they were led to believe that what they were getting was another Lord of the Rings. It wasn't. It was this massive, in terms of scope, cycle or saga. And a lot of people struggled with it."

Brawn, whose responsibilities extend to the literary estates of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Agatha Christie and other deceased writers, was contacted two years ago by Tolkien's son, Christopher, about the prospect of publishing The Children of Húrin.

At the time, says Brawn, HarperCollins was looking for a way to "reassert Tolkien's reputation as a literary author, rather than as someone upon whose writing The Lord of the Rings films had been based." Christopher Tolkien had previously cobbled together The Silmarillion from the same batch of unfinished texts left behind by his father.

The Children of Húrin, which features illustrations by Alan Lee, Oscar-winning art director of The Lord of the Rings films, also takes place on Middle-earth but at a time long before the trilogy. The novel is a single generational family tale. In that sense, Brawn says, it more closely resembles The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit than it does The Silmarillion, an overarching narrative encompassing the entire history of Tolkien's mythical Middle-earth.

"If you've read The Lord of the Rings, then this isn't that much more challenging," he says. "But if you're a fan of The Lord of the Rings by dint of just seeing the movie and found the language in the book quite complicated, you might struggle with this one, too."

Another caution pertains to its unsuitability as a bedtime story.

"The confusion would be that because it's got a dragon in it, like The Hobbit has, that automatically qualifies it as children's story. And it's not," Brawn says. "It's quite dark. There's a lot of death and destruction. It's probably not something you want your kids to go to sleep on."

Until today, Brawn was one of the few people who had even read the new book. Only a handful of U.K. critics have received advance review copies.

One retailer mistakenly put the book on sale for a couple of hours last Wednesday, a breach that came to the attention of HarperCollins when an excited consumer reported buying the book to a forum connected to the publisher (tolkien.co.uk). The book was quickly removed from the shelves, but in the minds of HarperCollins the incident validated the original desire to keep it under wraps.

"Because the Tolkien following is so large and well-connected thanks to the Internet," Brawn says, "the worry was that if we released early review copies it wouldn't take long – a matter of hours – before someone would read it, review it and spoil it for a lot of the real Tolkien fans."

If you're holding out for the movie, you might have to wait a while – probably not until after The Hobbit and maybe even The Silmarillion have reached the screen.

"There's been a lot of interest from film companies at the possibilities of turning it into a movie," Brawn says. "But the Tolkien estate is in absolutely no rush to have it turned into a film. No one is saying it'll never happen, but I think it will be quite some years before anyone has a serious discussion about it."

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